Surgery has become an important component of healthcare, but
along with recognition of its ability to enhance public health is growing
attention to its potential for substantial harm if practiced unsafely. In light
of this, the World Health Organization (WHO) established the Safe Surgery Saves
Lives initiative in 2007 as the second of their Global Patient Safety Challenge
topics.
This initiative promulgated routine use of a surgical checklist to
ensure systematic adherence to steps designed to promote safe surgical
practice. The Safe Surgery Saves Lives initiative led to an oft-cited 8-city
prospective trial of a 19-item checklist, which showed reductions in
complications and deaths after intervention – a result that has since been
reproduced by studies in other countries and practice settings.
The idea that surgical error rates can be improved by actionable
changes to a system that facilitates errors is of particular relevance to the
field of ophthalmology. First, ophthalmology accounts for a significant
proportion of surgical volume.
Cataract surgery alone is the most commonly
performed surgical procedure in the United States Medicare population, and is
projected to increase in the future. Second, there is ample evidence of
surgical errors in ophthalmology, referred to by the literature variously as
“surgical confusions”, “never events”, and “sentinel events”.Read More...
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